Writing Secure WordPress Plugins

Title: Writing Secure WordPress Plugins (part 1)
Author: David Kierznowski
Site: Operation n
Date: 17 May 2007

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. attribute_escape
3. wp_nonce
4. Summary
5. References

Introduction

WordPress has become one of the most popular blogging packages on the Internet; this is largely due to its ease of use and its object oriented design which allows the user to easily extend its capabilities in the form of WordPress Plugins.

Unfortunately, "ease of use", and "security" are to often like lemon and milk. This article is a desparate attempt to try and educate WordPress Plugin developers to some of the common security problems that can occur. The reality is, that this article is a bit to late, and unfortunately countless plugins are vulnerable to the attacks discussed here.

What does this mean? Well, it means that an attacker could potentially gain access to your WordPress Admin Panel, or take control of areas of your blogs such as your Google Adsense ads - maybe the attacker wants a little extra pocket money.

On the positive side, WordPress itself, does support a number of built in security functions to help combat these issues.

Rather then tackling all the problems in one go, this paper introduces 2 common pitfalls developers are making when writing WordPress plugins. After going through this article I hope developers of plugins (especially popular ones) will begin immediately working to resolve these issues. When this occurs, we’ll look at part 2 of this article.

I am hesitent to release this information as I know just how many plugins these vulnerabilities affect. For this reason, I will try not discuss to much on the exploitation side (although both are fairly trivial to exploit), but rather give guidelines to follow.

attribute_escape

Right lets get into it… the functions we will be discussing are "attribute_escape" and "wp_nonce_field".

Firstly, the attribute_escape function is defined as follows:

applied to post text and other content by the attribute_escape function, which is called in many places in WordPress to change certain characters into HTML attributes before sending to the browser.

You should use this function everytime you intend to echo back data to the user. This generally means all strings from $_GET and $_POST. Lets have an example to illustrate this (this vulnerable code is actually taken from a plugin):

if( isset($_POST['name']) && $_POST['name'] != ''
           && isset($_POST['code']) && $_POST['code'] != '' ){
            $desc = $_POST['comment'];
            ....

Now can you spot any problems in the above snippet of code? The problem here, is that the plugin is accepting any value that the user chooses as part of the POST variable named desc. This is not good, as any input including HTML entities will be echoed back to the users browser - Note, this also applies to $_GET as well (it even extends to other global variables supported by PHP, but that is beyond the scope of this paper). So lets secure this using the WordPress attribute_escape function:

if( isset($_POST['name']) && $_POST['name'] != ''
           && isset($_POST['code']) && $_POST['code'] != '' ){
            $desc = attribute_escape($_POST['comment']);
            ....

Notice how simple it is to implement this function.

Lets have a $_GET example (also taken from a plugin):

if ( isset($_GET['mode']) ) {
      $mode = $_GET['mode'];
      ...

Again, we see that we fail to escape our request from the user with add_attribute. So lets add it:

if ( isset($_GET['mode']) ) {
      $mode = attribute_escape($_GET['mode']);
      ...

Applying attribute_escape will greatly increase the security of your plugin. Remember the basic rule, if your plugin echoes back data to the user, ensure that attribute_escape is being used before this occurs.

wp_nonce

Our next security feature to our script is to add a random nonce value when using forms. The WordPres definition is as follows:

explain_nonce_(verb)-(noun)
allows a filter function to define text to be used to explain a nonce that is otherwise not explained by the WordPress core code. You will need to define specific verb/noun filters to use this. For instance, if your plugin defines a nonce for updating a tag, you would define a filter for “explain_nonce_update-tag”. Filter function arguments: text to display (defaults to a generic “Are you sure you want to do this?” message) and extra information from the end of the action URL. In the example here, your function might simply return the string “Are you sure you want to update this tag?”.

There is typically three parts to this:

1st, we check to see if this functionality exists and set it at the top of our plugin:

if ( !function_exists('wp_nonce_field') ) {
        function myplugin_nonce_field($action = -1) { return; }
        $myplugin_nonce = -1;
} else {
        function myplugin_nonce_field($action = -1) { return wp_nonce_field($action); }
        $myplugin_nonce = 'myplugin-update-key';
}

2nd, we declare our newly generated random nonce into our POST form:

<form action= ...>
      <?php adsense_nonce_field('$myplugin_nonce', $myplugin_nonce); ?>
       ...

Finally, we check the nonce is correct in our $_POST request:

if ( isset($_POST['submit']) ) {
      if ( function_exists('current_user_can') && !current_user_can('manage_options') )
      die(__('Cheatin’ uh?'));

      check_admin_referer( '$myplugin_nonce', $adsense_nonce );

Each POST request will now contain a random number that is required in order to make the POST request. It is slightly more difficult to implement then the previous one, but not at all complicated when thought through.

You may have noticed that this addresses POST, but what about GET requests?

$delete_url = wp_nonce_url($get_url . "mode=del", '$adsense_nonce' . $myplugin_nonce);

The above will provide our nonce into the URL, now we just need to have it confirmed in our $_GET function:

if($mode == 'del' ){
    check_admin_referer('$myplugin_nonce', $myplugin_nonce);

And your done… now make sure to test it :)

Summary

It is vital for the security of future WordPress plugins that attribute_escape and wp_nonce functions be used to prevent critical vulnerabilities which currently affect many such plugins.

I encourage developers to modify their plugins to reflect these changes. Forgive me if their are blatent errors in the paper, I wrote it quite late while fixing a vulnerable plugin…well I’m off to bed.

References

• http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2006/06/02/wordpress-203-nonces/
• http://www.wordpress.com

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